Huah! CoD: Advanced Warfare Multiplayer Trial Weekend

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More than any Call of Duty in a long time, I fancy a crack at Advanced Warfare. I want to see how those exosuits and zany futuristic weapons shake up what was already a pretty fast for a modern FPS, but I’m not curious enough to splash out – strewth! – £40. Thankfully, the multiplayer side is free to play on Steam this weekend, so I’m downloading that now. One minor issue: the download is 36.5GB, so you might not have much time left to play by the time that’s finished.

Something named ‘Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – Multiplayer’ should now be lurking in the depths of your Steam library, slipped in quieter than my uncle put pennies into my ear. You might think I’d notice something that large going into my lughole but nope, every time I was astonished when he pulled out a silvery ten pence piece.

The trial will end at 1pm PST (9pm UK time) on Sunday. Should you take a shine to the game, it’s on sale until Monday afternoon too. A 25% discount brings Advanced Warfare down to £29.99 on Steam.

If you’re out in the big wide world but have left your PC at home on, do remember you can log into your account on the Steam website to start a download remotely. This is the horrible part where I have to end the post and then a comments section will be shortly below this, full of people saying “I don’t know what your problem is, Alice – my download only took an hour” OKAY THANK YOU.

The downside: I now get incredibly impatient with the internet when I visit other people’s homes, and hotel internet is torture.

I wish the telecom companies would stop being so damn stingy and monopolistic with home internet speeds, because this sort of speed could easily be the rule and not the exception. I’m not even using some fancy third-party solution (or “business” internet), I’m just willing to pay a lot to the same old cable company that serves everyone else.

Well, yes, 200Mbps could be the norm, but with the starting point of either the US’ or UK’s existing infrastructure the corresponding norm cost would probably be even higher than you’re currently paying. If significant numbers of customers actually wanted that it would happen, but the vast majority of people just want ‘an internet connection’ (and in many cases are then unhappy that that’s exactly what they get.)

Yeah, Canada seems to have lucked out in this department. The cable and phone companies are just starting to lay proper FTTH, but the existing cable coax lines have taken us a very, very long way in terms of home speeds with minimal upgrades.

Also, our government has been willing to subsidise the laying of new line (to ensure it reaches everyone), so long as they get to apply their rules, such as forcing the big companies to lease the lines out to smaller independent companies at reasonable rates.

That’s not to say it’s perfect — every year, the telco lobbyists and outright planted agents in the regulatory body try to add more slack to the reins. But they’re mostly kept in check by charity watchdog groups stirring up public opinion these days.

I have to wonder where in Canada you live, because in my experience, our internet is ****ed. For a start, we pay more for our internet than any other first world country, and guess what? It’s also on average the slowest. Second, I know a lot of people who only have access to dial up despite promises made to us by our government about, oh… 14 years ago? Third, many Canadians have to deal with Telus…
Let me tell you a story about Telus. Once upon a time, Telus was my phone provider, and they had decided that they wanted to talk to me. So, what do you think they did? Phone me? Oh no. They disconnected my long distance service (meaning I couldn’t talk to my family). When I phoned them to ask what had happened, they told me that they just wanted to talk to me, and they would reconnect my long distance shortly.
Until 3 months ago, Telus was the only telecom company available in my area :)

I’m sure southern Ontario is pretty well-wired, and maybe Alberta, too, but most of Canada suffers from some pretty slow internet speeds. In Winnipeg, my Steam downloads max out around 2.5MB/s, sometimes spiking as high as 3.2MB/s. That’s not awful, but it’s not great either.

As someone who used to play a lot of COD around the time of Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 I absolutely hate this one’s multiiplayer. The exo-suit with its mid air strafing/double jump/cloaking/overpowered melee slam means it’s now even more heavily focused on twitchy reflexes and unpredictable movement.

I always seem to spawn in the middle of the enemy team as well, which is either me getting fed up of the game and making excuses or due to the map size.

Remember in COD 4, how the maps were relatively large, and you could go play sabotage and both teams would have a safe spawn in their base? What a lovely idea. It’s almost shocking how much better the game plays when your opponents aren’t MLG Pro at spawning behind you.
I would rather not divulge how much time I’ve spent playing that game. But let’s just say that I still remember every stat of every weapon. And I might have been the only person to ever actually earn their golden AK.
Also, Mile High Club is one of two achievements in gaming that I am legitimately proud of getting.
Back in my day, we had iron sights! And we were grateful for them!

I was really excited for this game (for some inexplicable reason) and I tried, desperately, to like the multiplayer. I just couldn’t.

The problem is that, with the exo jumping and movement, the game becomes very 3D. No more choke points, little location predictability, etc. In a game with such a low TTK the result is a lot of rage. WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?? WHY??

And God help you if you don’t play with a team. Angry Joe’s review nailed it for me. Yes, I could run in a circle with my back to the map sides but… ugh.

Exactly why it’s not in my downloads list right now.
Even if it were only 5GB (what do they need 36GB for anyway? NOTHING, that’s what, just bad optimisation) I wouldn’t waste my bandwidth for yet another call of doody